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Understanding signal flow, the direction and path a signal takes in your system, is so important. In the case of a recording studio, it goes from the sound source to its storage destination, but signal flow can be comparable to production order: how a product goes from manufacture to the store shelf. If at any point your product gets derailed, it will never reach its destination. Sometimes I like thinking about sound as a similarly concrete thing.

NASA has a Soundcloud, and it’s every bit as awesome as you’d imagine.

Part historical archive and part sound effects library, there’s an entire set dedicated to JFK’s quotes about Apollo 11:

As well as snippets of sound from space. My top three favorites are:

This is one of a series of star light curve waves captured by the Kepler mission and converted to sound. Note its rhythmic, periodic components.

Radio waves or wind in the tundra?

And finally, Voyager captures a sine wave sweep along with Jupiter’s lightning.

There’s many more sounds to be explored at the full Soundcloud page, including mission talk, rocket launches, and the strangely adorable sound of Juno saying hi in morse code. Not only is this further proof that NASA knows what it’s doing when it comes to social media (who else follows the Curiosity on Twitter?) this is also a fantastic new resource for composers and sound designers. But even going beyond that: NASA has provided a new way to experience our forays into the unknown. At a time when everyone could use a little inspiration, this is a wellspring. I hope it captures the public’s imagination.

We finish off our Introduction to Electronic Components series with the voltage regulator, which is a useful little thing. Sometimes, you have more voltage than you need—say, when you’re working with a 9 volt battery but you need 5 volts for your circuit. Also, if your project is especially finicky, they can also take in a fluctuating amount of voltage and emit a perfectly constant value.

If you’re looking for more about other components (say…diodes, buttons and switches, resistors, etc etc) check out the whole playlist!

The minutest movements of plant leaves. A glass of water: deceptively still. A bag of chips, lying discarded on the table. One of these things may be slightly less poetic than the others, but they do have one thing in common: scientists from MIT can recover sound from all three.

Calling it “the Visual Microphone” a team of researchers are using visual data to recover sound from videos of everyday objects. These objects are seemingly still to the naked eye, but upon reviewing the video, researchers were able to pinpoint the modes of vibration of these objects.

“When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones.”

Comprised of Abe Davis, Michael Rubinstein, Neal Wadhwa, Gautham Mysore, Fredo Durand and William T. Freeman, the team’s website says they’re working on releasing code and data. But so far, they’ve posted sound samples of their work. Check it out here.

That’s right, we’re finally posting the second part of our at-home Foley extravaganza! Last Thanksgiving we put together a Very Special Episode about a Foley fight scene. Later, we returned to the subject and created dinosaur chomps out of that same sound! Of course Ronny crunching on some celery doesn’t have quite the same menacing quality that an on-screen, cretaceous bringer of doom and death properly deserves, so we’ll show you how to make your dino crunches sound big and scary.

Oh and since this video our friend has seen the error of his innocent finger-attacking ways and now lives peacefully in the NYU Studios.

A digital-based project, Alex Haff’s Draw MIDI uses capacitance sensing to collect electrical signal from a pencil-and-paper keyboard, converts that to MIDI using an Arduino, and then sends the code into your computer via a Max patch. That may sound complicated, but it’s quite simple once you understand the function of each part of the project.

System Requirements and Code

While this project can technically be done on Windows, it takes a bit of finagling. We recommend Mac OSX.

Because Draw MIDI is a digital project, you’ll also need some code. For this project, Alex used both an Arduino sketch and a Max patch. You can find each of them here and here.

The Arduino code will run in the controller’s software on your computer. The Max patch will need to be run in Max. If you don’t own Max, never fear. You can copy and paste the code into Max’s free runtime application.

Step-by-Step

NYU Music Technology is an active member of the Instructables.com community. As such, a step-by-step guide of building the project may be found here.

Edit: Thanks for the feature, Instructables!

We had a lot of fun with this week’s project and hope you will, too! A special thanks to Langdon Crawford for cleaning up and hosting the code.

Paper Circuits

Paper circuits have been making their way around the tech world because their low-cost components give them great potential for cheap mass production. For DIY, they offer similar affordability, a great availability of materials, and they’re just plain fun. There’s a novelty in creating something interactive from ink and graphite. Usually, our words and drawings can’t fly off the page, but with the addition of electronics they can light up or be heard.

Edit April 3, 2014: Hey everyone! Hope no one minded our little April Fool’s joke. That said, we’d love to actually make this video. Who wants to do some research? (We do.)

In this video, we explore the science behind bass drops. Why are bass drops so popular in electronic music? Are we responding to pitch the same way cognitively as we do to dynamics? Join us as we explore just why bass drops are so popular. Is it the tension and release? Does it cognitively have to do with the way the pitch drops? Are we, in fact, evolutionarily inclined to love the bass? Or, at least, to respond to it.This video is best listened to on Beats headphones or the phattest sub you own. Please don’t use your Macbook speakers.